The Great Leap Backward

Looking back on my thoughts from Jan 19, 2025

The night before Trump’s inauguration, I wrote a column about what I thought his economic legacy would be.

I submitted it to my editor at Bloomberg, but it wasn’t accepted. They had just published a suite of pieces about the transition. I’m a contract writer, which has the freedom of pitching whatever I’d like to write about rather than being assigned a topic, but with the catch that they won’t always take it. I wrote instead about hiring rates and return-to-office mandates, and archived the unaccepted draft.

It hasn’t been 100 days since, yet it feels like we have all been through Something. So much tumult. So much destruction. So much harm. So much lost.

I went back, and read over my predictions, which I share with you today.

The Great Leap Backward…

What can we expect from the economy in Donald Trump’s second term as president? It’s a question on many minds, no doubt, given the relative precarity of the US’s current position and the potential destruction of what he’s proposed as a candidate.

To review, in the past five years the US economy has seen: the single largest month of job loss on record, the worst unemployment rate since the Great Depression, the fastest job growth in fifty years, the highest inflation in forty years, eleven interest rate increases, consumer sentiment hanging out at lows typical for recessions while the yearly growth of the S&P 500 averaged 15%.

By some miracle, the economy has emerged from this fever dream with normalized price growth and an unemployment rate of 4.1%. Predictions abound about how the new president’s plans for tariffs, deportation, tax cuts, and the gutting of the federal government could affect this hard won but vulnerable steady state.

Those predictions live in the short term. In the long term, there’s little question that Trump will be a failed economic president—not by progressive standards, but his.

Trump’s central economic ethos is to recreate the past, and he will fail.

In the short term, any range of outcomes is possible. And it helps to remember that when it comes to the economy, Trump is truly charmed. Over the past 50 years, only three presidents have come to office in a stable economy, one that wasn’t tipping into recession or struggling as it came out of one: Jimmy Carter, George HW Bush, and Donald Trump. Though in Trump’s case, it’s true twice over—both 2016 and 2024.

This correlation between bad economies and new presidents makes sense on some level; a bad economy tends to compel voters to kick the incumbent out of office and the new guy comes in to clean up the mess. Yet, it also emphasizes that an administration born out of economic stability is a gift.

Trump’ll squander it. Maybe not immediately, or obviously. Maybe the real time performance won’t suffer much because at the end of the day even the president is no match for a $20 trillion economy.

But what we’re losing is the chance, from a position of strength, to embrace an uncertain future and make it our own. Trump’s whole ethos—clear from both campaigns—is to look backward.

White men with high school degrees used to have more opportunities for high paid manufacturing jobs.* So let’s tariff our way back there. It wasn’t that long ago that immigrants were less than 5% of the population and now they are almost 15%. So let’s send them back.

Other views he’s not espoused directly but his surrogates affirm in his silence. Working women complain about how expensive child care is, basically asking taxpayers to raise their kids. No sale. If you can’t afford to have kids, don’t have them, and if you can’t afford child care, stay home like women used to.

Problems that don’t have a neat nostalgia with the past get less attention, like wealth and income inequality, healthcare affordability, housing affordability, and the threat of AI on jobs. These get the “concepts of a plan” if they get anything at all.

Trump’s promises, and this yearning for the past translated into economic policy, have incredible appeal. But they work better in elections that they do in power, and it means that he’s guaranteed his own failure. Not on the small things—no doubt tariffs and deportation will occur to some degree—but he will fail to deliver on the big promise of recreating greatness defined by what was, rather than what could be.

We can’t go backward. And in 25 years, that will probably be Trump’s legacy. A hard learned lesson that however appealing the past, the economy moves forward with or without our policy leadership.

…Starts With Small Steps

Those were my musings before this all started, and I think what I couldn’t appreciate at the time is how violent this all would be. It’s so senseless—destruction for destruction’s sake.

But I read my words back and it felt like a friend patting me on the back reassuring me to keep a level head. Trump has backed himself into a corner. He’s going to write cruel executive orders about diversity and transpeople, but he can’t erase the people. He’s going to carry out cruel and illegal deportations, but we are still a country of immigrants. He’s going to use our economic livelihoods as a bargaining chip in a trade war, but manufacturing employment will never reach the levels of past eras.

He only has one guaranteed legacy and that’s to fail at making America 1955 again. His goal, not mine, and he’ll miss.

It’s a nice thought.

An even better one: all the ways to build and rebuild for a better future.

*When I originally posted this article I mistyped this as “white men without high school degrees,” instead of “with high school degrees.” It caused some consternation in the comments! Apologies.

Photo by Maximalfocus on Unsplash